The streets were filled with women and girls carrying colorful fans and wearing fragrant sachets. They wore dazzlingly colorful hair ornaments, and the flower pins they had bought at the Flower God Temple market two days ago still came in handy. Girls from ordinary households simply snapped off a pomegranate blossom from their courtyards and tucked it at an angle by their temples, and that was beautiful too.
Tomorrow, the children would tie colored threads, gourds, and other such things around their arms, calling them "Chang Ming Threads." They would toss them away after the Dragon Boat Festival, which the old saying called "casting away calamity." Some children curiously asked why, but the elders could not explain it either. They only said it had been passed down generation after generation. If the children kept asking, all it took was fishing a muskmelon out of the well for them or buying them a bowl of iced sour plum soup, and they would quiet down.
After leaving Thousand Pace Corridor and passing the Flower God Temple, Pei Qian and Guo Zhujiu wound through streets and alleys toward Liuliu Factory, stopping outside a shop that sold iced bowls. The shopkeeper took fresh seasonal ingredients of every sort—lotus seeds, water caltrops, fox nuts, and the like—chilled them with sugar, then scattered on almonds, hazelnuts, and sesame seeds, tossed in a few candied fruits, and lined the bowl with a fresh lotus leaf. Whew, color, fragrance, and flavor all in one; before their mouths could crave it, their eyes already did.
Since she had attended the celebration, Pei Qian had put on a face mask. Besides, "Grandmaster Zheng Qian" was rather famous in the Great Li Capital City. Still, she wore her hair in a bun.
Guo Zhujiu naturally did not need all that trouble.